A Cheap And Unworthy Failure

I’m honestly not certain who would want a Red Sonja movie. There was a time when a film based on the character made sense. Originally created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith for Marvel comics, and loosely based on the Robert E. Howard character Red Sonya of Rogatino, the character was a female counterpart to Conan, and when Conan was popular (in the 1980s due to his film), a Red Sonja movie seemed like a good idea. At least on paper, anyway. From a practical standpoint, though, the 1985 Red Sonja movie was a complete disaster, and likely damaged the character in the public eye.

Since then, there have been many attempts to get a new Red Sonja production off the ground. From a basic standpoint I can understand why: a warrior in a tiny metal bikini, going around and fighting bad guys with a sword has its own baked in hook. But Sonja is fighting a losing battle on two fronts. The first is that barbarian movies in general only had a very brief window where they were popular. That was in the early to mid 1980s, and just as quickly as they rose up, they faded away as people got bored with the whole concept.

The second factor working against the character is that, outside of the select comic fans that know about her, most are unaware of her existence and fewer care about her at all. She doesn’t have a baked-in audience the way Conan does, and even Conan struggles to bring audiences to his films (see the failure of the 2011 Conan the Barbarian). If Conan can’t do it, how is Sonja supposed to? Which is why studios have tried, and failed, to get a new version of her off the ground, despite multiple attempts, and multiple directors, all giving it their best shot.

That leads us to 2025 when, finally, a new version of Red Sonja hit the big screens. Don’t be shocked if you didn’t realize it came out, though, as the film didn’t play on many screens, and in fact only had a one day release before it was shoved over to home video. It made a whopping $271,000 at the Box Office, and was forgotten before it even had time for anyone to realize it existed. Going in and watching the film I can see why: it’s a really terrible film with terrible production values, bad acting, and worse action, all of which would be crippling for a film of this nature. And that sucks because you can kind of see, deep down, where the film just might have worked if a studio actually would have cared about making this film properly.

Matilda Lutz stars as Sonja, a hunter with a shock of red hair, living in the ancient forests her people used to populate. She was one of many Hyrkanians living in the lands around the forests before her village was attacked by the armies of the old emperor. She was just a child then, and she got separated from her people, forced to grow up alone, to find her own way in the world. She picked up survival skills, as well as a love and appreciation for the forest, and effectively became the forest’s protector, going after anyone that poached in the lands.

When Sonja finds a couple of men hunting in her woods, slaughtering creatures and taking trophies, she follows them back to their home base. What she finds is a whole fortress built into a burned out section of the land, with men capturing creatures for their emperor. The new emperor, Draygan the Magnificent (Robert Sheehan), who rose from the ranks of slavery to become the most powerful man in the land… in part thanks to a prophetic book he’s been carrying that tells him the secrets of the universe. But the book is incomplete, and Draygan knows that the other half of the book lies with the Hyrkanians. When his men capture Sonja, he throws her into a battle arena to soften her up, just so he can get information out of her. But putting her in the fighting pits will only make her stronger, and he might just create the very foe that could topple his whole regime.

Barbarian movies aren’t necessarily deep, and Sonja lends herself well to basic tales of blood, vengeance, and heroism. Bad guys show up, wrong her in some way, and then she swears a blood feud and kills anyone that gets in her way. It’s simple storytelling, but it could be quite effective if done properly. A woman with a metal bikini, a sword, and nothing to lose is splashy enough to put on a poster, and fun enough to entertain the masses that would show up for a silly bit of action trifle such as that. But it requires the film being good, and Red Sonja very much isn’t.

The problem for the film is its budget: it doesn’t have any. Exact figures are hard to come by, but most likely the film was made on a budget of $17 Mil. Bear in mind that’s for a high fantasy movie with lots of actors, costumes, sets, special effects, and CGI. Your average Hollywood production spends $20 Mil on a single action sequence, and Red Sonja had to spend that for its entire production. There was no way that a film requiring extensive action set pieces alongside deep world building would ever be able to pull all of that off. It’s impossible.

To get around this, the film cheaps out on just about everything. For starters, it functionally only has six or so sets: a forest temple (which is really just a tree with a fake pond around it), a village, a wooden fort, the caves under a battle arena, the arena itself, and a couple of rooms in a castle. We go back and forth between these sets often, making it feel like a kingdom (nay, empire) that must be massive is really just a small plot of land in the middle of Eastern Europe (which, functionally, it really is).

The film also calls for extensive, lengthy action set pieces. To get around this (since clearly the budget wasn’t there for any of that nonsense) the film simply skips ahead any time there was supposed to be a big battle. Characters remark about what just happened, some people look wounded, and we’re just supposed to accept that a massive battle happened over there while we were looking over here. It sucks a lot of the fun, and consequence, out of the film when everything that is interesting happens elsewhere. Oh, pity we missed it. Maybe next time.

There are times the film does commit to action and, somehow, it’s even worse. Clearly the production couldn’t afford good action choreographers. While actress Matilda Lutz supposedly went through a month of extensive sword training, it’s hard to tell that from what we see on screen. No one comports themselves well with any of the weapons they’re given, hitting at each other weakly and barely looking like they’re committed to the action at all. Plainly the director didn’t know how to film action, and no one really knew how to block it out as it’s all so painful to watch, and that’s before we even harp on the bad CGI used for sets and the occasional monster as well.

Even if we could somehow set all that aside, it still wouldn’t excuse the acting. Lutz isn’t bad, and she at least tries, but most of the actors in the film really suck. Wallis Day (from Batwoman) is here, doing an incredibly unremarkable job with a “crazy” character that should be interesting. Rhona Mitra shows up as a fighter in the arena, and she’s just as bland and unremarkable as she is in every performance she’s ever given. Luca Pasqualino plays the supposedly charismatic Osin the Untouched, except without an ounce of charisma in his performance.

Honestly the only actor I actually liked in this film was Robert Sheehan, who does everything he can to elevate the material. He’s kind and then cruel, charismatic and then evil, funny and then harsh. He has range, and turns Draygon into a scenery-chewing, scene-stealing villain. Every time he shows up the film improves, and he absolutely shows that a good actor, playing a good villain, can really make a movie. I just wish the rest of the film was anywhere near as good as the performance Sheehan is giving here.

The real tragedy is that somewhere in this script there’s a solid little story. If the film had a budget of, say, $60 Mil instead of $17 Mil, I think we could have had something here. A simple story of a woman out for revenge, who gets captured and then fights her way to freedom, saving a kingdom in the process, is a story that works. Hell, it’s basically the story of Sparticus, and we’ve gotten multiple successful adaptations of that tale. Swap in a badass female with red hair, and the movie practically sells itself. Or it would if there was anything worth selling.

This film has a budget that would sadden even a CW television production, and it looks worse than even that network could achieve. Because of that, whatever worked in the script is lost in the translation to the screen. I’ve never seen a film get so betrayed by its lack of a budget, but that’s exactly what brings this film down. With more money we could have better sets, better actors, better action, and an overall better production. You can’t make a high fantasy film on $17 Mil in this era of filmmaking, and Red Sonja is proof of that.

I don’t know if Red Sonja was ever going to be a great film, but it could have been a trashy and fun one. Instead we got this mess which could have been something if only it had been given a little more money. It wasn’t, and the resulting film is more of a mess than just about anything I’ve seen before. It’s a tragic waste of time, effort, and what little money was spent on the production, and it will likely sink any attempt at a real Red Sonja film for decades to come.